The Screaming Forest: Bartholomew's Account
After a few rounds of cards with Relar, a few wins a few losses, Bartholomew takes some time for himself and begins to transcribe the events that occurred the passed adventure Only a few hours since we touched ground on the beach the first of us that touched down encountered a drunkard that was digging 6-7 graves if memory serves, raving on and on about a screaming woods towards the north west. His name was Filas and he was one of first that touched down on this island, what kind of man he was before we will never know but the current man that stood before us was using alcohol to cope with traumatic experience. We asked him the nature of these holes he was digging, there were for exactly what we imagined but hoped that it wasn't the case. We asked him to tell us about his experience in hope that we could help remedy it in some way, he spoke of things that came in the night, things with human heads but gnarled organs in the woods to the north west. Though he was visibly shaken and disturbed he still wanted to go back though he wouldn't tell us why, we assumed to bury his brothers in arms. We agreed to aid him and we set off with extreme caution. '' ''We set off with Filas in tow to the site of his former camp, we crossed a few rolling pains over the course of the day before we started noticing a peculiar type of tree. This tree was unlike anything I had seen before, it was colored like a fine marble that one would see in a king's court and it was.....pulsing, Definitely magical in nature but I could not determine what kind. As we pressed on in the direction of the camp we started to see these same marbled trees with increasing frequency until we entered a forest full of them. I will be the first to admit that it was very....unsettling being there, surrounded by these trees. We continued on with Filas showing us the path towards his camp, within a few minutes we were in there. '' ''There had definitely been some kind of altercation here, there were rake marks on the ground, clothes laid out as if someone had been abducted out of them, and a general mess. Ophe, the drow that was accompanying us was the first to notice that up in the trees there was a body, the look on Filas's face was one of terror. I made an attempt to calm him down but it was as if he just wanted to leave and took off in a sprint, he would have been successful had it not been for Phalanx, the massive mountain of a half-orc that stopped him. Before we could even get out a question to Filas we were set upon by these horrors that came out from the trees, monstrosities of unknown origin containing a mix of human body parts and looked like tree limbs, and with them was a moving bush with these odd tendrils coming out of the center. Though they looked terrible these shamblers, as I have began to call them, were fragile as demonstrated by Roy, one of our fighters. He was able to cleave through one of them with ease, and being wood creatures they were also very flammable. One of the odd things about these shambles is that after the tendril-bush was slayed, those that were still standing did not move, they stood there like thralls without an order just waiting for a command. We fought off the horrors from the woods along with a few more of these bushes that attempted to ambush us. When the fighting ended we noticed some clear viscous sap coming from the corpses of these horrors, first we though it to be the "blood" of these creatures but then we realized that the sap was mobile, and it was moving towards the west, we unfortunately had no vials to contain it so we decided to make camp here, as the sun was starting to set. We found Filas after the fight, he was hiding in the tent that his old group set up. He brought him out and he wanted to continue on still, after what he had seen though he was acting extremely erratic and was definitely hiding something and he wouldn't tell us what it was. He said that he didn't want to tell us or we would steal it from him, after that we were on alert, we settled on keeping watching 2 man teams, we would watch for dangers first and made sure that Filas didn't try anything funny. I ignited a fire with the corpse of one of the fallen shamblers, it was then when we made the discovery of the sap's volatility, when I lit the fire the sap ignited after some time in a brilliant blue flame before it settled down. The night went uneventful for the most part, except for the screams.... Once we awoke we were about to start making something to eat to get us ready for the day, which was when we realized that Filas was missing. We found his tracks heading westward and we followed after them. As we were following the last tracks that we could find we found a rag, it looked like it was part of Filas's clothes, we stopped to try and figure out what could of happened, there was nothing to scrape one's self on, perhaps a shambler came out and abducted him...little Did we know that the answer was looming over above us. From both the north and the south, two massive serpents, both easily over a hundred feet long and with a mouth wide enough to swallow a human around my size whole, descended from the trees and attacked. I had heard of the foolhardy and brave nature of dwarves before but never had I seen it first hand as they were so few in number, but I witnessed it when these serpents fell upon us. Four of us subdued the snake that attacked us from above, the one that was sneaking up from below was being held in place by the dwarf Murdock, who stared the serpent in the eyes and had it focus its attention on him. After the first one fell we quickly dispatched the second one, though it wouldn't have been so quick had it not been for Golin, our man of the cloth that kept us from falling. I can confidently say that had it not been for him we all would have died there. It was after the fight while we were taking body parts off of these serpents when we made a grim discovery, Filas....dead in the mouth of one of the serpents and with him a golden key that Phalanx picked up. I uttered a small prayer and we continued on, before he died Filas said there was something that he didn't want us taking from him perhaps the key unlocks something further to the west. We continued on westward looking for anything unlockable by key, but what we found was more of that sap, a lot more of it a pool to be exact. When we approached the pool of sap we noticed a massive gem in the middle of the pool towards the bottom. Golin was able to detect something off of it, it was a mix of abjuration and necromantic magics. We wanted to take it to examine it but none of us were willing to enter the pool of sap to retrieve it as we didn't know what effect it would have on our bodies. We did however know that the sap was flammable, so I had everyone stand back and I threw a few firebolts into the pool. After a delay a massive fire ball erupted from where the pool was with a heat so grand that it singed a bit of my hair and singed part of my scarf, luckily it didn't damage any of my beads. Phalanx then jumped down into the pool and took this massive jewel and attempted to climb out, when he attempted to exit with the jewel it was as if something wanted to keep him or the jewel in the pool. The sap began to flow back in to the pool at an alarming rate, we barely had enough time to get Phalanx out of there. We then began to look at the jewel before we noticed the sap begin to turn from its clear state to an inky pitch color, as black as coal and began to ooze out towards us from all angles. Phalanx threw the jewel back into the pool and the sap calmed down and receded, it was then we noticed that there wasn't just one pool with gems but multiple all over the forest floor. Roy went over to a shallower pool and took a tiny gem from it, and the pools began to act the same way it was then we were attacked by more of those bush-tendril horrors again. We killed a couple of them before from out of the sap we saw these human-tree shamblers begin to rise up and start to attack and out number us. We made a tactical retreat and came out of the forest alive, snas Filas. Though we did not discover what the key unlocks we did gather a lot of information from our adventure, these necromantic gems and pools are what animate these horrors, though we still need to find out how and why. Somewhere out there there is something that this key unlocks, we need to find that as well. Perhaps these unanswered questions will be revealed to us at a later time when we return to the screaming forest. ....Also beware of giant snakes.'' Bartholomew puts his pen down and closes his book and returns to the camp to join the rest of the group.